Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

could be laboriously typed and copied with carbon paper, or learned by heart.

No doubt there are authors – I am plainly not among them – who may trace the intellectual dimensions of the decline and collapse of communism and its consequences in a similar manner, through the fortunes of their works. It is obviously far harder to do so for two reasons. Before the fall of these regimes dissident or even heterodox literature was barely allowed above ground. There is no way to measure the impact of writings which were inaccessible in print to most readers, though this does not mean that such works might not become known in other ways. Since the end of communism the publication of serious writing about history and politics has depended on the subsidies of well-wishers such as the admirable George Soros. This tells the author little about his or her intended, potential or actual readers. Thanks to Soros, whose foundations and other benefactions have almost singlehandedly kept intellectual and scientific activities in the ex-USSR and much of Eastern Europe from being swept away by the forest fire of the so-called ‘free market’, at least two of my books, The Age of Extremes and Nations and Nationalism, have been published in a variety of the lesser East European languages, whose tiny public could never possibly have justified the enormous costs of translation. Moreover, one of them (Nations and Nationalism) is a critique of the very ethno-linguistic nationalism on which the small successor states are based, so that it is extremely unlikely that there was much pent-up demand for such critiques in the relevant bookshops of Tirana, Pristina and Skopje. However, since the world still lives in the shadow of the tower of Babel, how could I tell?

Nevertheless I have probably coped better with the Babel problem than most of my English-speaking colleagues, not least because my professional life has not only been peripatetic but multilingual. Historians, of course, need languages more than any scholars other than linguists and students of comparative literature, as very little except purely local history can be seriously studied entirely in a single language, even within most single states. Thanks to the advantage of a bilingual upbringing, a certain gift for picking up languages by talking rather than formal instruction, and the ancestral Jewish experience of moving from place to place among strangers, I have conducted my teaching, and to a modest extent my writing and radio or TV work, in various, not always well- mastered, languages. This has given my professional career a more cosmopolitan tinge than is common, not to mention a more recognized presence in countries whose radio and TV journalists can rely on a few words in their public’s language spoken into their outstretched microphone, or even a public lecture or TV conversation. Over the years the departmental office in Birkbeck grew accustomed to the multiple accents of foreigners asking for Professor Hobsbawm’s room, the non-Anglo-Saxon sounds round my table in the cafeteria, and the gradual adjustment of Peruvian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Bengali or Middle Eastern research students to London life. Not all these students were bona fide academics. In the past forty years English has become so much the universal idiom of global communication, and knowledge of French, the other international language, has declined so fast, that scholars like myself have lost much of their earlier function as interpreters and intellectual brokers. Yet that role remained important in Europe, at least during the lifetime of the generation of great monoglot French intellectuals who (with the rarest exceptions such as the brilliant and unhappy Raymond Aron) could neither speak nor understand English. I acted as translator for the great historian Ernest Labrousse at the early postwar conferences of the Economic History Society. (He warned me firmly against having anything to do with white Bordeaux, unworthy, he thought, of any self-respecting French drinker.) Except in French, I could not have established any relationship with Fernand Braudel. Even in the mid-1960s, when the next, less monoglot, generation reached maturity, it was far from fluent, as France’s premier historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, will confirm, if he recalls his first visit to London. Scholars from Eastern Europe once relied on French; in the 1990s their pupils at the New School had no difficulty in writing their term papers in English. And yet, even today the global village in which academics live must continue to rely on multilinguality, as any western intellectual can verify if he or she finds him or herself guideless on a street in Nanjing, Nagoya or Seoul – that is to say functionally deaf, dumb and illiterate. Someone there has to speak at least two languages.

Nevertheless, the global village is real, and since the limits of time and space have been virtually eliminated, the academic profession, having once again become what it was in the European Middle Ages, namely one of wandering, or rather nowadays airborne, scholars, lives in it. I suppose I have now lived in it for something like forty years. It is at this point that the line between professional career and private life becomes hazy, or disappears altogether. In memory the dinners for some visitor from abroad in the seasons of academic migration (as after the end of the summer term) merge with the memories of the Christmas dinners where the family was usually joined by friends, local or foreign, temporarily unattached or hostile to the seasonal spirit: Francis and Larissa Haskell, Arnaldo Momigliano, Yolanda Sonabend. Not that professors have friends only among other academics, though in the nature of things many of their friends are. Indeed one reason why Marlene and I have chosen to live in metropolitan milieus is that no university community is big enough in London or New York to dominate social life there. On the other hand, whether among academics, media people or in business, the global village is a place not so much of lives as of encounters. Each of its inhabitants has roots and most have permanence – either ‘here’ (wherever this may be, London, Cambridge, Manhattan) or elsewhere. Often, and this is new, they have multiple roots or at least multiple attachments, domestic or professional – my seasonal commute from London to Manhattan, the professional couples whose working weeks are separated by continents and oceans, united only at weekends or even more rarely.

The global village is the set of points of encounter of these entities in constant Brownian movement across the contemporary globe, expected, as in conferences and symposia, or casual and unexpected, at work or on holiday. It is the question ‘What are you doing here?’ which has punctuated my life in Santiago de Chile, Seoul and Mysore. But this is only one kind of encounter in the global village. Impermanence, isolation, unforeseen contingency in rental car, bar and hotel room with CNN are its dimensions. Even the highly organized circuits of what might be called business or professional tourism – the academic symposia in beautiful places, the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, the Fondazione Cini in the waters of Venice, the luxury business get-togethers within reach of beach and golf – are not the real locus of the global village. It really takes shape in the local network of human communications which fits together indigenous families, peripatetics and foreigners, arrivals, projects and departures. In short, it operates primarily through global circuits of domestic hospitality. For that is the basic pattern of life of most married academics, as of other settled professionals. The men and women who come into our houses are not ‘family’ but they are as familiar as if they were, whether they happen to come from New Delhi or Florence or whether they do so in Helsinki or Manhattan. They are part of our small everyday world. Very likely we have heard about them, they about us, even when friends bring us together for the first time, which will generally not be the last. We have the same points of reference and share the same news and gossip. We may well arrive with them from somewhere else to establish a new, permanent or semi-permanent existence in a new environment, as happened to us in my early years in the New School in the 1980s. We live among them, they among us, as neighbours.

In my case it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life, comfortable, varied by travels, increasingly accompanied by Marlene, combining work, discovery and holiday, novelty and old friendships. Only the knowledge that people who live in poverty, the constant presence of disaster and death can also laugh, or at least tell good jokes, gives me the courage to say: it has been a lot of fun. It has not been a professional life of dramatic action, hardship or (except in the mind) of danger and fear. Like others in the small favoured minority to which I belong, I am amazed at the ‘patent contradiction between one’s own life experience … and the facts of the twentieth century … the terrible events which humanity has lived through’.³ By the criteria of professional success, it has not been unsatisfactory. It has given me more private happiness than I ever expected.

Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: ‘One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.’ As the man said when I read him in my youth: ‘The point is to change it.’

19

Marseillaise

I have gone to France almost every year since 1933, except during the Second World War. The country has been part of my life for almost seventy years, indeed for longer, because my mother had begun to teach her children French at home from the elder Dumas’s